Although
I have already published a print edition of Legge's two trilogies
(Thomas Legge: The Complete Plays, two volumes, Peter Lang
Verlag, New York-Bern, 1993) the publisher has kindly granted me the
right to produce a new, electronic edition of these works. I welcome
the opportunity, for three reasons. First, of course, making these
texts available in this format allows me to take advantage of the
power of hypertext publication. Second, in the past decade I have
learned a good deal about Renaissance versification, and I would hope
that my explanation of the intricacies of Legge's metrics will strike
readers as more plausible than what I rather naively wrote ten years
ago. Third, the availability of new tools for searching Classical
texts electronically facilitates the compilation of a far richer and more detailed
line-by-line commentary on the text than was then possible.